A contractor cuts up a Douglas Fir that dropped across the roof of a home on Middle Fork Road between Chehalis and Onalaska.
By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
CHEHALIS – At least three houses in Lewis County were damaged from downed trees during Monday night’s windstorm according to information compiled by early yesterday, and reports continued to come in throughout the day.
Lewis County’s division of emergency management said the wind blew through about 9:30 p.m. Monday and caused widespread damage and power outages from Centralia to Ashford. The strongest gusts of up to 40 mph came between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., according to a news release.
“We’re getting more damage reports from around the area, mostly in the east end from Packwood, Randle and Ashford,” Sgt. Ross McDowell, deputy director of emergency management said Tuesday evening.
Even Gene Seiber, the former deputy director of emergency management and current chief criminal deputy at the sheriff’s office, was affected. A 20-foot limb the diameter of a baseball punched a hole in the roof of Seiber’s Packwood-area home.
“There’s a lot of damage up there,” Seiber said. “There are trees and limbs all over the place in High Valley.”
He described a neighbor’s porch that was destroyed by a 12-inch in diameter fir tree that just missed the house when it crashed down.
The houses McDowell knew for sure were hit with trees were in Paradise Estates in Ashford, on Crystal Way in Morton and the 300 block of Middle Fork Road near Onalaska.
Susan Burnett, who has lived on the nine wooded acres between Onalaska and Chehalis for 20 years, said she felt really lucky when she saw her house in the daylight.
“It’s not really as bad as I expected, after leaving in a panic and coming back,” Burnett said.
A Douglas Fir, estimated to be as tall as 150 feet, had dropped across her roof, stretching from the front to the back of the house.
Burnett’s electricity and heat was shut off yesterday as contractors took a chainsaw to the fallen tree.
Inside, she said, the tongue-in-groove ceiling was broken from front to back. She was most worried about a collection of art work, painted by her great-grandfather and other relatives, which were among the debris in her dining room.
The manager at Lewis County Head Start said her insurance company got the contractors there by about 1 p.m. and an appraiser would be out by Friday to tally up the dollar damage.
Burnett said she was watching a movie Monday night when she began to hear fir cones and branches hitting the roof. The storm came on really fast, she said.
Then she could hear a tree falling, its branches breaking off as it toppled.
“I just stood there and hoped I was standing in the right place, and I guess I was,” said Burnett, who escaped injury.
She called 911, but the wind was still so strong, she didn’t dare go outside for fear of getting struck by limbs that continued to fall, she said.
When firefighters arrived, they stayed only long enough to turn off the electricity, check Burnett’s well-being and and cut a path so Burnett could get her car out. It had been parked next to the house, beneath where the fir fell but was mostly unmarred.
“The planets were aligned right or something,” she said.
McDowell said he didn’t think the dollar amount of damage in Lewis County was great enough to meet the threshold for disaster assistance.
However, the state Emergency Management Division is encouraging members of the public who received physical damage to their home or business to report it to their local emergency management agency.
Contact information for each county can be found here
A winter storm warning remains in effect through 10 a.m. tomorrow in East Lewis County – on the west slopes of the central and northern Cascade Mountains and passes – and is primarily expected to bring snow.
Tags: By Sharyn L. Decker, news reporter